The present invention pertains to power control in mobile telecommunications systems and more particularly to mobile channel power control for multimedia broadcast and multicast (“MBMS”) services.
Mobile telecommunications systems transmit information wirelessly over the air. Power of the transmitted signals is a driving consideration in today's mobile telecommunication services since the power varies with the distance between the mobile telecommunication station and the user's equipment.
Today multimedia services, which are broadcast wirelessly, require large amounts of power. The power required to serve multiple users for multimedia functions can be as high as 50% of the power of the mobile telecommunication cell site.
Typical mobile telecommunications channels are switched between a dedicated channel and broadcast channels to support multimedia services. The switching is based upon the number of users of a particular multi-media service. The switching requires complex signaling. Switching furthermore is slow and uses over-the-air resources inefficiently, such as soft handoffs. Multimedia cells must be turned off when there are no users served by the cell in order to conserve power for the remainder of channels in the mobile telecommunication system, which requires that users be tracked and counted.
Accordingly, it would be highly advantageous to have methodology for controlling power for cell sites which serve point-to-point and point-to-multipoint multimedia services.